[HN Gopher] A Visualization of Galactic Settlement
___________________________________________________________________
A Visualization of Galactic Settlement
Author : the-mitr
Score : 163 points
Date : 2021-06-16 11:43 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.centauri-dreams.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.centauri-dreams.org)
| xwdv wrote:
| One thing missing from this to help get a sense of scale is a
| running count of the number of souls populating the galaxy. Would
| be great if they can also show "settled" population and
| population in transit to some destination for settlement.
| cletus wrote:
| A lot of thought has gone into this area. I think the parameters
| of this simulation are too conservative, which is perhaps the
| point. Several issues:
|
| 1. Speeds are likely to be much higher. We largely rely on
| chemical propulsion plus gravity slingshots. For a sufficiently
| advanced civilization you're likely to concentrate a star's power
| to provide significant outward propulsion (and braking!) without
| the mass concerns of carrying reaction mass;
|
| 2. Once you've built one of those starships, it will likely
| continue on its journey after stopping at a new system to
| colonize and resupply. It's not clear to me if the simulation
| assumes this. Given the time frame of 1B years it seems not;
|
| 3. Stars in the Milky Way rotate at different speeds. Like in a
| few hundred thousand years we'll have a new closest neighbour for
| awhile. This potentially increases spread as the colonized
| systems drift further away extending their reach over time;
|
| 4. The simulation just looked like a collection of stars rather
| than, say, a spiral arm galaxy.
|
| So a realistic timeline is closer to 10M years than 1B years.
|
| I'm firmly in the camp that believes the speed of light is a hard
| limit. FTL drives and variants (eg wormholes) just seem to be
| wishful thinking by people who don't understand function domains
| (eg negative mass). Assuming that, a galaxy-spanning civilization
| is unlikely to be a civilization in the sense we understand it
| given that it might take you >1M years to cross from one side to
| the other.
|
| That's not really a problem for detecting such civilizations as
| the source of detection isn't likely to be EM transmissions (as
| the SETI program began looking for). Instead, it's likely to be
| the IR signatures of Dyson swarms.
|
| Short version: in space, the only way to cool down ultimately is
| to radiate that heat away into space. That radiation is
| completely dependent on the temperature of the object radiating
| heat. For any normal range temperature that's firmly in the IR
| range. So, if a star has a Dysown Swarm, it'll shine incredibly
| brightly as an IR source with a very low amount of visible light.
|
| Can you spot one such star? Possibly not. But an entire galaxy?
| You're likely to be able to see that from 1M+ LY away, easily.
|
| Given the small amount of time this would take to eventuate, in
| cosmological terms at least, the reason we haven't been able to
| detect any highly-advanced civilizations within our light cone is
| quite simple: there aren't any.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| #3 was very much included in the simulation
|
| Also, I don't think it was meant to be a fastest or even
| nominal case simulation. It could clearly be run with different
| inputs
| rho4 wrote:
| > one of the comments on the article site: "I have yet to see a
| convincing argument why advanced civilizations would need to
| constantly expand like bacteria in a petri dish."
|
| E.g. to escape from violence, conflict and war.
| pfdietz wrote:
| The assumption there is that advanced civilizations only do
| things that they "need" to do. That's not true of any
| civilization at any point in history.
|
| Would an advanced civilization find value in colonization? Very
| likely -- colonization (biological or machine) is likely the
| cheapest way to explore another stellar system in detail, with
| explorers manufactured or born in situ.
| katabasis wrote:
| The simulation includes this assumption:
|
| > Technology persists in a given settlement for 100 million years
| before dying out
|
| Seems wildly speculative to me. Our own civilization has only
| been around for a tiny fraction of that time and future prospects
| are already looking pretty uncertain. And if we lived in a galaxy
| where civilizations had this kind of longevity, one would think
| we'd see some evidence of potential signals out there.
|
| My own pessimistic take on the Fermi Paradox is that life and
| intelligence may not be very unique but there is no reason for
| them to be long-lived either. Most civilizations are probably
| just a "flash in the pan", existing too briefly and separated by
| too great a distance to ever come into contact with another one
| (or even learn of another's existence).
| throwaway316943 wrote:
| My optimistic take is that advanced civilizations capable of
| travelling the galaxy don't spend their time hanging around
| planets and stars for the same reason we no longer hang around
| caves and fire started by lightning. They've mastered fusion
| and matter transmutation so they just build their own habitats
| and energy sources wherever they want.
| throwaway316943 wrote:
| I'm not a fan of galactic settlement simulations mostly because I
| think they simulate the wrong thing which is rate of diffusion.
| This treats the civilization as a static thing that simply
| spreads out at the edges. Compared to the history of human
| civilizations this is clearly unrealistic. The question to answer
| is what happens within the already colonized systems over time.
| How often would breakaway civilizations appear, wars, extinction
| events, mind upload cults, Luddite revolutions, stagnation, etc.
| Filters abound. The great civilizations of Earth's past have
| succumbed to similar fates and we've only progressed by starting
| over again and again.
| cestith wrote:
| One thing I seldom see mentioned, too, is why would a K3
| civilization use easily detected communications like radio or
| broadly focused light sources? If we launched Voyager 3 (for
| lack of a better name) next decade, would we use primarily
| always-on, omnidirectional radio? Would we use a laser? Maybe
| we'd use a tightly focused, burstable digital radio system.
| What about next century? Are we simply looking largely for the
| wrong things?
| grishka wrote:
| The tightly focused radio beam would still leak into
| surroundings and scatter off of things, and would thus still
| be detectable.
|
| Thing is, we still don't know yet what matter and energy
| actually are. We still don't understand the nature of
| spacetime. We have a lot of physics to discover. Those other
| civilizations might have discovered physics in different
| order. They might be communicating using phenomena we have no
| idea exist.
|
| It's not right to assume that advanced alien civilizations
| will be using any technology similar to ours.
| giantrobot wrote:
| A radio observatory on Earth might be using a fiber optic
| connection to connect to the rest of the world but it's
| still looking at natural radio phenomena. It doesn't matter
| at all what a civilization might use as a backhaul, their
| Space iPhones could use SubspaceWifi, but their radio
| observatories will be looking at natural molecular hydrogen
| emissions.
|
| For an interstellar beacon signal radio is pretty good.
| Lots of natural phenomena are radio sources, CMB is radio,
| and a lot of things opaque to visible and near visible
| light are transparent to radio. So a radio beacon has a
| good chance of being detected just because any civilization
| that discovers radio astronomy can stumble across it.
|
| The idea that SETI would ever detect I Love Lqwynngh'tch
| reruns from an ETI has always been ludicrous. Even our most
| powerful radio telescopes (by sensitivity) wouldn't be able
| to detect television or radio broadcasts even a lightyear
| out from Earth. The only interstellar signal we (or another
| civilization) will ever detect are very intentional
| directed signals.
|
| If you had an omnidirectional radio source detectable from
| interstellar distances you could use it once as it would
| fry itself and anything around it pretty quickly.
| mordymoop wrote:
| I feel a need to add an important extra wrinkle. The front line
| of progress and growth in all things is driven by those who are
| pursuing progress and growth. If an upload cult arises in a
| planet, and 90% of the populace retreats into simulations, the
| remaining 10% are still around and we be selected to be exactly
| those people most invested in the material universe; within a
| few years (not millions of years, certainly) there's a good
| chance they'll be considering expansion. Or, consider how often
| new civilizations are formed by small populations of refugees
| from intolerably oppressive larger civilizations. Something
| like a war, extinction event or ecological difficult is
| similarly likely to prompt a desire for expansion as it is a
| total collapse.
|
| Science fiction is full of sentences of the form, "The Klaatu
| were an alien race who colonized the galaxy a million years ago
| but have since moved on." I always roll my eyes at this. Almost
| no matter what the Klaatu are or what they care about, there
| would be some group of them remaining. And the only Klaatu we
| would see would be the descendants of the ones who stayed.
| Giant galactic civilizations made of individuals are unlikely
| to make coherent collective decisions with no dissenters for
| the same reason our single planet (with much less serious
| communications obstacles) never makes unanimous collective
| decisions.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| What if 90% of the populace retreats into simulations, but in
| such a way that the remaining 10% have no political power and
| no industrial base, because that all remained with the
| majority? Hard for the non-uploaders to expand in that case.
| varjag wrote:
| It's hard to command control over the physical reality when
| you are willingly absent from it.
| autosharp wrote:
| Is what a chimpanzee might think of the white house.
| z3ncyberpunk wrote:
| Is what a delusional megalomaniac who out themselves in a
| matrix might think, just like the president. You
| seriously have to be a delusional megalomaniac to head
| the runaway train that is the presidency. Any power
| gained inside that matrix is disconnected and invalid
| from any reality and will never be willfully accepted.
| The only means of control is through perpetual
| authoritarian violence
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| I don't understand your argument. How much control do you
| think the White House exercises over chimpanzees? Your
| hypothetical chimpanzee is completely correct.
| varjag wrote:
| Or what rest of the world been thinking of the White
| House.
|
| Point stands.
| Swenrekcah wrote:
| POTUS himself may be absent from Africa but not from
| physical reality, and the physically real resources under
| their command certainly aren't absent from the various
| corners of the world.
| sidlls wrote:
| That's quite contrived in my opinion. How can people
| uploaded into a simulation maintain that level of control
| in the physical world for any durable period?
| hyperpallium2 wrote:
| Software eats the world; control the software.
|
| It's an interesting question. How do people maintain
| control now? In general, it is not through physical
| control. We have institutions, we have "manufacturing
| consent".
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| We have those in a negative sense. Manufactured consent
| is mostly about directing motivation towards wars of
| control and acquisition and _preventing other activities_
| - including the peaceful development of sustainable
| energy, which is finally happening fifty years after it
| could have, and non-corporate non-military access to
| space on top of a non-corporate internet, neither of
| which are happening at all.
|
| Manufacturing positive consent for a billion-year project
| is - obviously - a completely different kind of problem.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| They have to keep up all the computing infrastructure
| running the simulation, and deal with long-term threats
| like geological activity and asteroids. That requires
| having and maintaining considerable technology out in the
| real world, and if only a mere 10% refuse to enter the
| simulation, then that minority may not get to benefit
| from spacefaring technology, or have the capital or
| industrial base to develop their own.
|
| In fact, since spacefaring presents a threat (kinetic
| bombardment) to any planetary-bound species, then that
| majority who choose to enter the simulation may want to
| expressly prevent the minority from leaving the planet.
| z3ncyberpunk wrote:
| That's their problem, those who did not Matrix themselves
| are not beholden to those who gave away their lives
| without force, but since they are virtual, they have none
| and exist where the 10% can pull their plug at any time.
| You out too much faith in virtual existence
| DocTomoe wrote:
| Wouldn't it be a lot easier for the non-uploaders to, you
| know, just pull the plug? Or change the input to the
| digital existances in a way to simulate a reality
| "outside"?
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| No, because - as I mentioned above - the uploaders would
| still maintaining all kinds of technology to monitor and
| control the outside world in order to ward off any
| threats (natural disasters, sabotage from the non-
| uploaders) to the computing infrastructure on which the
| simulations are running. If the majority of society
| chooses to upload, then that suggests that such
| protective infrastructure is already so stable and
| advanced, that the non-uploaders would be powerless to
| simply "pull the plug".
| philistine wrote:
| You're getting very close to ending up with the script to
| The Matrix.
| mordymoop wrote:
| This is obviously not impossible, but we are now in the
| realm of adding clauses to an already rather specific
| scenario, each clause adding another degree of
| improbability. (The odds of "an upload cult arises on a
| planet" is by definition greater than "an upload cult
| arises on a planet AND actively presents anybody else on
| the planet from ever leaving.)
|
| I think the metaphor to look to isn't necessarily even
| human civilizations spreading around the globe; it's life
| spreading through the planet to colonize every niche out
| of which the slightest scrap of energy can be extracted.
| throwaway316943 wrote:
| Change the "upload filter" to "total upload filter" smaller
| chance but still relevant. Also it was a silly sci-fi
| example, I'm sure sufficiently advanced societies can think
| up better forms of planetary dead ends.
| belter wrote:
| Your comment is interesting, but thinking about it, this is the
| most likely thing to happen:
|
| Any technological advance in interplanetary travel speed or new
| technologies of renewable and easy source of energy, would
| promote expansion. The new arrivals to an empty planet could
| start all over again, claim the resources as theirs, organize
| their own laws. And if they are overcome somehow move to other
| planets and start all over again...I think there is wave coming
| our way if we think about it.
| throwaway316943 wrote:
| Yes my point is that each system colonized becomes its own
| independent case subject to destroying itself or regressing
| or becoming antagonistic towards its parent civilization.
| Think back pressure or resistance. The question I'm asking is
| at what point does that resistance turn the tide of
| expansion.
| scotty79 wrote:
| they assume 1 successful colonization ship per 100k years. This
| might take into account periods of stagnation and Luddite
| revolutions and such. Sentient beings do various weird thing
| but they do them fairly quickly.
| throwaway316943 wrote:
| I'm taking issue with the lifetime of the civilization, not
| the rate at which they send out colony ships.
| godelski wrote:
| This is far more complex to model, and near impossible to. I
| wouldn't expect to see this anytime soon.
|
| But to give you some hints, breakaway civilizations would
| likely happen all the time. Every space program has issues with
| astronauts not following orders simply because the astronauts
| internalize the idea of "what are they going to do? Come get
| me?" This is frequently talked about in settings where they are
| discussing Moon and Mars colonization. A Martian colony won't
| really belong to the US/China/EU/whatever for very long. I'd
| expect something very similar to Red Mars/The Expanse.
|
| Another big reason for this will simply be time of light
| communication delays. Between Earth and Mars that's 8-15
| minutes one way. It is highly impractical to control a
| territory when communication takes so long, they will
| effectively become independent. We've seen this historically
| too. Colonies operate drastically differently than their home
| countries. Being so far away it is difficult to communicate and
| cultures will diverge, especially considering that their day to
| day lives will be drastically different. Different needs
| creates different cultures. But luckily this distance also
| makes war difficult between two planets. You have months to
| respond.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Every space program has issues with astronauts not
| following orders simply because the astronauts internalize
| the idea of "what are they going to do? Come get me?"
|
| From the script to _Casino_ :
|
| > Every couple of weeks I used to send Marino back to the
| bosses with a piece of what I made.
|
| > Not a big piece, but fuck them, what did they know? They
| were fifteen hundred miles away... and I don't know anybody
| who can see that far.
|
| On the other hand...
|
| > Between Earth and Mars that's 8-15 minutes one way. It is
| highly impractical to control a territory when communication
| takes so long, they will effectively become independent.
|
| This is totally wrong. Between Earth and Earth, empires have
| exerted effective territorial control while communication one
| way took _weeks_. A 15 minute delay in communication is
| meaningless. The problem is the difficulty of traveling, not
| of communicating.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> empires have exerted effective territorial control while
| communication one way took weeks._
|
| That's because the effective territorial control was _not_
| exercised by the central government of the empire, but by
| territorial governments that were on the spot and that had
| pretty much complete authority to act on their own
| initiative without getting permission from the central
| government. They only had to meet very general policy
| goals. So the speed of communication with the central
| government was not relevant to the effectiveness of the
| territorial control.
|
| The question is whether a territorial government on, say,
| Mars would have the same loyalty to the central government
| on Earth that, say, British territorial governors had to
| the British empire. Without that loyalty on the part of the
| territorial governments that are on the spot, there is in
| fact no way for the central government to effectively
| control territories.
| godelski wrote:
| Thank you, this is what I was trying to suggest. That
| these localized governments, while loyal to their
| empires, operated fairly independently (which should be
| fairly obvious for similar reasons to space. Which travel
| times are actually similar). Hopefully your comment has
| helped clear some confusion up.
| pydry wrote:
| Most of the same tactics used to control colonies could
| be used to control Mars.
|
| Moreover, Mars would probably be utterly dependent on
| earth for multiple generations.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> Most of the same tactics used to control colonies
| could be used to control Mars._
|
| Those tactics only work when backed up by a credible
| threat of overwhelming force. I do not think the Earth
| will be in a position to bring overwhelming force to bear
| on a Mars colony. It's a lot harder to do that across
| tens of millions of miles of space than it is to do it
| across an ocean. And even across oceans on Earth it often
| doesn't work.
|
| _> Mars would probably be utterly dependent on earth for
| multiple generations._
|
| I'm not so sure. We have barely even started exploring
| Mars; we have no idea what resources exist there. We are
| still discovering new resources here on Earth; I would
| expect that humans on Mars would be doing the same there.
| edgyquant wrote:
| True but the reason these territories respected the
| metropoles laws is because they were aware if they didn't
| the metropole had the resources to overrun them if they
| were upset enough. The same will be true of any off world
| colony for the foreseeable future.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> the reason these territories respected the metropoles
| laws is because they were aware if they didn't the
| metropole had the resources to overrun them if they were
| upset enough_
|
| I don't think that's true, since, as godelski points out,
| in a salient historical case where the colonies did _not_
| respect the home empire 's laws--the United States of
| America--the home empire did _not_ have the resources to
| overrun them. The British ended up learning similar
| lessons in South Africa and India later on.
|
| I think the main reason colonial governments respected
| the home empire's laws is that the territorial governors
| and their personnel were loyal to the empire; they
| believed in the empire and its aims. When that loyalty
| goes away, as it did in the USA, the home empire can't do
| much about it.
|
| _> The same will be true of any off world colony for the
| foreseeable future._
|
| You must be joking. If the British empire was unable to
| enforce its will on the United States, with only an ocean
| separating them, how could an Earth empire possibly
| enforce its will on a Mars colony, with tens of millions
| of miles of space separating them?
| godelski wrote:
| I'm not convinced that's true. The New World exists for
| exactly this reason. The British were not able to sustain
| a war half a globe away with the Americans. It is
| incredibly expensive (hell, even the French supporting
| the US took a big hit). All a Martian colony would need
| to do is play guerilla warfare and wait it out. There's
| plenty of history to suggest that this is an effective
| strategy.
| narag wrote:
| There's a factor that would make a difference, a question of
| identity. A civilization grown out of a migration and only
| possible thanks to advanced science would look at some things
| unlike any other that we know.
| xbar wrote:
| There are lots of questions to answer. Some can be modeled more
| easily than others. This one is pleasant because the model is
| simple enough for a broad audience to reason about, and the
| visualization is straightforward.
| JackFr wrote:
| It's true that filters abound but the idea that we've had to
| start all over again is Whig history. It's been a continuum.
|
| That being said I agree with your main point. The difference in
| worldview, ethics, where man sees himself in the universe over
| the course of our history (let alone pre-history) has taken
| dramatic and difficult to model changes.
|
| Imagine the worldview of the builders of the Great Pyramid vis
| a vis our own. (And then remember that Cleopatra was far closer
| in time to us than them.)
| QuesnayJr wrote:
| Isn't it the opposite of Whig history? I thought Whig history
| was the idea of continual progress.
| throwaway316943 wrote:
| Yes, thank you, that's essentially what I'm arguing
| against. There's no reason galactic civilizations should
| continually progress especially when each settled system is
| effectively cut off from its parent by light years of
| distance.
| shusaku wrote:
| The history of human civilizations is a blink in the eye
| compared to the history of the human race. And compared to the
| time scales of the simulations they run. So I wonder if maybe
| those filters end up as noise when we're talking about filling
| the galaxy. History is less of a detailed story and more of a
| fundamental force.
| h2odragon wrote:
| "looking for technosignatures" .. Which'd be what? AM radio
| transmissions? Spread spectrum stuff? How would we have
| interpreted our own "technosignature" 100 years ago?
|
| Compare the efforts it takes to talk to Voyager vs SETI: unless
| the aliens are talking to us _in the way we are looking for_ we
| 're not likely to see them.
|
| I won't even get in to the blithe assumptions about the ease of
| interstellar travel; Charlie Stross has a lot to say there and
| all said better than I could.
| unnouinceput wrote:
| You can safely assume that one of the fundamental forces of our
| Universe is the same, namely electromagnetism, which means that
| yeah! AM/FM radio would be among those signatures.
| h2odragon wrote:
| Let me try to express that better: When we were just figuring
| out FM radio ourselves, i don't think we'd have been capable
| of recognizing a modern spread spectrum WiFi transmission as
| a signal. It would have been an elevated noise level and
| puzzling, perhaps.
|
| So the next hundred years of human advance, I expect, will
| bring similarly transformative changes in the ways we
| communicate and the shape of our "technosignature".
|
| Our expectations for what other species might be doing don't
| seem to be informed by the things we know we've done.
| gus_massa wrote:
| I can't find an official source, but the graph in this page
| look interesting https://nutsaboutnets.com/wifisurveyor/
|
| It looks like using only old technology we can detect the
| signal and identify it as a artificial signal, but it would
| be very hard / impossible to decode.
| angus-prune wrote:
| Related to this.
|
| We are basing what we consider natural phenomena on our
| observations of the galaxy.
|
| If we were to flip the assumption from life being rare to
| life being pervasive, what assumed natural phenomena could
| in fact be evidence of life?
|
| There is precedent for this on Earth. We are just startign
| to discover how much The Amazon rainforest is actually a
| human creation and basically a massive multi-generational
| bioengineering project.
|
| This is not a serious position fo mine, btw, I know that we
| can track most astronomical phenomena back to fundamental
| laws of nature.
|
| But equally there are some massive astronomical myseteries
| (dark matter/energy, certain stars being more/less common
| than expected etc) and I can't quite dismiss the wonder
| that our baseline assumptions have been tainted by this
| assumption.
| varjag wrote:
| Imagine if all the dark matter is repurposed for mega-
| civilization habitation and energy needs, and the matter
| we see is poorly suitable rejects
|
| There's your Fermi paradox, we live in a dumpster pile.
| shakezula wrote:
| I like this interpretation of the Fermi paradox the most:
| We're a dumpster-dwelling species barely qualifying as
| sentient compared to the species whose dump we inhabit.
|
| Lines up great with my self-esteem.
| thereddaikon wrote:
| Or Galaxies are the ultimate mega structure and dark
| matter is merely the observable signature of the gravity
| modification tech they use to hold them together.
| unnouinceput wrote:
| You can listen to all the radio frequencies at once, from
| low AM ones up to dozens of GHz using inexpensive radio
| components - it's how bug hunters you see in movies work,
| they just measure electromagnetic waves, regardless of
| their wave length.
|
| Granted, you'll not be able to differentiate between them,
| only that they exists. And at this point of searching for
| those signatures that's all you need though. Also Marconi
| was listening to lightning strikes generating radio waves
| using his radio, and that was over a century ago. Lightning
| strike generates radio waves all over the spectrum, so we
| had this capability right from beginning.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Or in next 100 years we might figure out how to use
| neutrinos for communication and find out that galaxy is
| actually quite busy place, it's just nobody uses
| electromagnetic waves for comms same way they don't use
| smoke signals.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| One of the current technosignatures are em radiation indicating
| Dyson spheres or swarms around sun's. Another is molecules in
| planetary atmospheres which are only known to arise from
| industrial applications.
| [deleted]
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| We can capture all known forms of interstellar radiation, we
| have a baseline of background noise, and we can see if they are
| chaotic or structured. I don't believe technosignatures are
| indistinguishable from noise.
|
| I mean sure, sci fi mode engaged, aliens may have ascended our
| own physics and may use quantum entanglement or subspace for
| communications and the like, in which case we wouldn't know.
| And our own signals too will get weaker and garbled over time;
| I'm not sure if even our own radio broadcasts 100 light years
| away are discernible from the background radiation of all the
| stars.
| lapp0 wrote:
| centauri-dreams.org ... Hmm, more like pipe-dreams.org
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| Colour me a little disappointed.
|
| Firstly, this seems obvious. The conclusion of "even really slow
| spaceships will colonise the galaxy given enough time" is almost
| mind-numbingly banal.
|
| Secondly, the parameters seem to be chosen in order to produce an
| "interesting" propagation pattern, rather than based on any
| actual data or guesstimates (I know there is no data, but making
| shit up is no substitute).
|
| Thirdly, it doesn't answer the big important question of "where
| are they?" (as fnord77 asks). Saying "even really slow spaceships
| will colonise the galaxy given enough time" brings us immediately
| right back to "how much is enough time to colonise the entire
| galaxy?" which they then say is ~1 billion years.
|
| Fourthly, but they're not here. So the answer to that question
| must be "over ~10 billion years". So either the simulation is
| wrong (because it takes longer than ~1 billion years) or it's
| pointless (because the only other explanation is that there has
| been no such colonisation effort, so why are we modelling it?).
| This wasn't addressed at all.
|
| Fifthly, this assumes that all solar systems can be colonised,
| and will produce another colony ship 100,000 years later (for
| inadequately explained reasons). Given that we know a fair bit
| about the actual galaxy (though the simulation doesn't look
| anything like our actual galaxy), why didn't they run the
| simulation on our actual galaxy, and exclude the stars that we
| know can't be colonised (because red giant, etc)?
|
| Finally. Is this the state of cutting-edge research on SETI? This
| wishful-thinking make-believe "look what I made Mum!" stuff? If
| this was a bootcamp dev showing off their WebGL modelling demo,
| I'd be impressed. 'nuff said. Sorry to be harsh, but... really?
| this is it?
| [deleted]
| avaldes wrote:
| > Finally. Is this the state of cutting-edge research on SETI?
| This wishful-thinking make-believe "look what I made Mum!"
| stuff? If this was a bootcamp dev showing off their WebGL
| modelling demo, I'd be impressed. 'nuff said. Sorry to be
| harsh, but... really? this is it?
|
| I mean, when all you have to work is literally nothing all you
| can do is speculate. It is disappointing but what can they do
| but throw everything at the wall and see if it sticks.
| throwaway316943 wrote:
| Well they don't have absolutely nothing. We know how much it
| costs to get mass into orbit, we know the launch cadence
| we're capable of, we know how long it takes to build huge
| vessels like nuclear powered submarines and aircraft
| carriers, we have realistic proposals for propulsion
| techniques that could get us to our nearest neighbour. You
| could make limited extrapolations from these points to figure
| out how much it would cost and how long it would take to
| build a colony ship. That would tell you a bit about the
| conditions necessary to begin colonizing the galaxy and you'd
| be able to tell if those conditions were likely to occur in
| the near future. We know how long it took to colonize the
| Americas so you could adjust that data. That should give you
| both the rate at which you can create colony ships and how
| long it takes for a colony to reach the point that it can
| begin building them.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| It seems like this is an entirely different question than
| the one evaluated in the article.
|
| IT is a an interesting question, but it seems weird to
| fault the article for not being something different.
|
| Alternatively, one could argue that all of this data is
| worthless in predicting the industrial capacity of
| spacefaring culture, at least 100,000 years more advanced.
| Im guessing this is why they didn't bother.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| this. But I see no attempt to do any of this work. Just "1
| colony ship every 100,000 years, limited to 15 light years"
| unnouinceput wrote:
| Looking at the video, and assuming that indeed that's how a Type
| II->Type III civilization spreads around, I've counted 2 full
| rotations of the original star. One rotation in our galaxy takes
| 230 million years (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactic_year)
| which means even if we start today to spread around would still
| take half a billion years to populate the galaxy. Now if only
| genetics would deal away with aging to be around when that
| happens :).
| aj7 wrote:
| It seems like it would be trivial for a civilization to have a
| policy of no electromagnetic emissions so no signature at all.
| 10km/second is absurdly slow. Who would want to make the trip,
| and condemn thousands of generations of her progeny to bizarre
| ship life and culture?
| douglaswlance wrote:
| You could load a ship up with frozen embryos and have an
| automated system that raises the first generation.
|
| Though, honestly, humans are terrible galactic conquerors. The
| artificial life that we create will be the ones taking over the
| galaxy.
| hungryforcodes wrote:
| To be fair, we'd need to have an actual galactic history as a
| race to know if that's true.
| Syzygies wrote:
| > The artificial life that we create will be the ones taking
| over the galaxy.
|
| Exactly. A galactic version of "core wars". If we leave any
| trace at all it will be our machines. Future life will
| resemble 3D printers in search of raw materials, not GI
| tracts in search of food, spores that will survive billion
| year voyages with infinitesimal chances of success.
| TOGoS wrote:
| That's the premise of one of my favorite sci-fi stories, The
| Songs of Distant Earth by Arthur C Clarke. The stuff about
| what-do-people-do-when-the-apocalypse-is-coming-but-kind-of-
| a-ways-off was cool too.
|
| (in case anyone scrolling by is looking for additions to
| their to-read list)
| weeblewobble wrote:
| also a major plot in Elysium Fire by Alastair Reynolds
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Ship life would probably be better than the lives many people
| experience today, in first world countries. There's also
| probably some super advanced VR by that time.
| keiferski wrote:
| Imagine that VR develops over the next few centuries. Millions
| of people engaged everyday, for 10-12-15 hours. At that point,
| what's the difference between being on a ship or being on
| Earth?
| nicoburns wrote:
| If life is like that, then why bother going?
| m4rtink wrote:
| To build a Dyson sphere so that you have enough power to
| finally run VR Minecraft at 60 FPS! ;-)
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Because someone wants to
| rho4 wrote:
| e.g. because your star is about to blow up.
| keiferski wrote:
| I didn't say I was going to sign up :)
|
| But I don't think it's too far fetched. Imagine a VR system
| that doesn't require wearing a helmet and can be displayed
| in physical space. And/or a Matrix-style direct jack into
| the brain. Any environment you can think of, easily
| accessible. Doesn't seem that bad to me.
|
| Beyond that, A lot of people already spend 10+ hours
| staring at screens here on Earth...
| nicoburns wrote:
| Does it replicate smells, tastes and touch sensations as
| well as just sound and vision? I spend a lot of time
| staring at a screen, but it's the time I spend not
| staring at a screen and interacting with other beings
| that makes life worth living.
| keiferski wrote:
| Obviously we are speculating here, but projecting current
| tech 300-400 years into the future, it doesn't seem that
| absurd to me.
|
| And don't forget that you'd be in space with tons of
| other colonists too.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Why bother staying? Why bother anything? Because why not.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| The ability to get off and out. In practice this is already
| possible and many people's daily life.
| tomp wrote:
| All transmissions that are distinguishable from noise are
| energy loss.
|
| If the ships are big enough, living on them approximates living
| on a continent / planet...
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Who is to say life on a colony ship is undesirable? It could
| offer the best lifestyle possible and be culturally glorified.
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| A machine intelligence. Just turn yourself off for the trip.
|
| Generally I'd say that the notion of a Von Neumann machine is
| so obvious and so effective that there's something really wrong
| in our guesses on how widespread intelligence is.
| signal11 wrote:
| > Who
|
| Civilizations aware of imminent extinction-level events may
| choose to do that, similar to how shipwrecked sailors may
| fashion a raft and "risk it" in the off-chance they survive.
| edgyquant wrote:
| But why would they go off to a different system instead of
| just colonizing around their sun or even other planets close
| to them? If it's their star is gonna blow why would they go
| any further than the nearest star?
| signal11 wrote:
| Depends on the ELE. There are several which can swallow
| entire solar systems, and the nearby stars may not be
| hospitable. Maybe the endgame is to find a habitable
| planet?
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| It wouldn't even be about colonization, because it would be
| infeasible to make a return trip or, unless communications
| technology changes (e.g. quantum entanglement magic), even
| phone home upon arrival. The only thing I can think of is
| survival of the species, survival and spread of life itself.
| It's not infeasible to believe that's how life on earth started
| - not as a spontaneous process, but a natural spread of life
| from elsewhere (panspermia) or a previous life form spreading
| the building blocks on purpose.
|
| But life on earth has been going on for hundreds of millions of
| years so I don't think we'd find any traces of it.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Life on Earth is billions of years old.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_evolutionary_h.
| ..
| Aeolun wrote:
| > Who would want to make the trip, and condemn thousands of
| generations of her progeny
|
| Presumably the people that do this do not think ship life will
| be _that_ bizarre.
|
| I'm frankly more concerned about the sustainability aspect than
| how daily life will work.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Their propulsion speeds are low (today's technology but you'd
| need D-D fusion or antimatter to keep warm) but 100 Myear
| survival time is hard to believe.
|
| I also don't believe a species that masters slow interstellar
| travel would care about stars and planets. Most of the mass which
| could be exploited by life is floating between the stars in the
| form of comets and if you could "live off the land" out there you
| could create millions of miles of apartment buildings and
| shopping malls.
|
| Why trek into an inner solar system and build yourself a space
| shuttle that can land full of fuel and then take off when you are
| settled into a space lifestyle?
| shakezula wrote:
| > I also don't believe a species that masters slow interstellar
| travel would care about stars and planets.
|
| > Why trek into an inner solar system
|
| Why venture off to unknown shores to build yourself a farm when
| you're settled into a comfy European lifestyle?
|
| Although we only have ourselves as a data point, I think that
| natural curiosity is a strong evolutionary trait that we
| developed, and it's not a huge stretch to assume that other
| lifeforms would develop the same curiosity.
| throwaway316943 wrote:
| I imagine an interstellar civilization would have this to say
| about planets:
|
| "A nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there"
| fnord77 wrote:
| so, in 13.51 billion years, where are they?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#Hypothetical_exp...
| aaroninsf wrote:
| ITT: many propositions and counter-propositions constrained by
| presumptions that next-level civilization and its modes of being
| and interacting with the universe are "necessarily" much like our
| own.
|
| One example: "upload" and "simulation" do not have _any_
| predetermined relationship to the material behavior of a species
| engaged in it. The mapping between agency in any presented
| reality and the species-consensual one is _arbitrary_ and the
| distinction between simulation and reality might just as well be
| framed as a question of sensorium cum UX.
|
| Very very little can be extrapolated upward from our own
| limitations and constitution either as individuals or societies
| or species.
|
| An even deeper example: fundamentals like the relationship to
| time may be radically different. It may not just scale, it may be
| fractal; and the notion of what constitutes agency and the locus
| of selfhood and identity, and hence self-interest, may be
| distributed emergent and predicated on an interplay between ant-
| and-colony at multiple levels, each of which is fully "conscious"
| and intentional in the sense we understand those things, at
| different time scales.
|
| What does a third grader know of amortization?
|
| We are not even out of the womb as a species.
| tomiplaz wrote:
| There's a great video on this topic from the Cool Worlds Lab
| channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7OeeGcMFMc
|
| Taking into account ship ranges and settlement lifetimes produces
| very different results (15:36 in the video).
| carapace wrote:
| Two things: 1) Check out "The Millennial Project":
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millennial_Project:_Coloni...
|
| > The Millennial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy
| Steps by Marshall T. Savage is a book (published in 1992 and
| reprinted in 1994 with an introduction by Arthur C. Clarke) in
| the field of exploratory engineering that gives a series of
| concrete stages the author believes will lead to interstellar
| colonization. Many specific scientific and engineering details
| are presented, as are numerous issues involved in space
| colonization.
|
| I find the cover image of a green galaxy is very inspiring!
|
| 2) Due to the nature of exponential growth, we will eventually
| feel a population crunch when reproduction overwhelms the rate of
| expansion. This is true even if we invent FTL ships. The crunch
| would be delayed (perhaps for millions or billions of years) but
| it is inevitable.
| gmuslera wrote:
| It may be the Dunning-Kruger effect for civilizations. The ones
| that didn't reach the stage of interstellar travel think that is
| trivial to travel and settle in other star systems. But the more
| advanced ones may have different ideas, or think that it is a
| waste of time/resources compared with some more interesting
| alternatives.
| user-the-name wrote:
| > Ships are launched no more frequently (from both the home
| system and all settlements) than every 0.1 Myr -- every 100,000
| years;
|
| > Technology persists in a given settlement for 100 million years
| before dying out;
|
| Those are... uh, some kind of numbers. Really not sure _what_
| they think they are simulating here, but it sure does not sound
| like anything we 'd expect to happen in reality.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| Maybe their birth rates are so close to the replacement rate
| they don't feel an urgent need to spread out from a given star
| system very quickly. Or maybe they have modified their
| sensibilities to prefer fully exploiting an existing system
| before moving on to a new one. But yeah these parameters do not
| seem realistic.
| user-the-name wrote:
| 100 million years ago, _grass_ didn 't exist, let alone
| technology.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Maybe they wanted to be conservative, because if they use the
| actual numbers the galaxy would go red in just a few frames?
| jaspax wrote:
| More like they have a bizarre mix of numbers which are way
| too large and those which are way too small. Technological
| civilization lasting 100M years per planet? But those
| civilizations only try to colonize once per 100K years? And,
| at the same time, their colony ships take tens of thousands
| of years to reach their destinations? I have a hard time
| imagining ways in which all of those are true at once.
| foerbert wrote:
| I'm not sure why you see this as so bizarre. This seems
| like a fairly conservative estimate across the board,
| intended to be used to produce some kind of lower bound,
| rather than be an expected case. This is a pretty common
| and normal idea.
|
| Is it that you think the technological civilization
| duration is not conservative? Remember we're talking about
| a civilization that can cross the galaxy here. They can
| show up in a star system and throw habitats across any
| planets, moons, or asteroids they find appealing. They can
| also set up whatever number of space structures they want.
| What exactly do you think is so likely to utterly
| extinguish this species in every star system within 100M
| years?
|
| The long duration between colonization events is not only
| highly conservative, it also functions here to allow any
| particular civilization to be pretty irrelevant. Even if
| some crazy war breaks out within a star system, a single
| surviving habitat is enough to allow the next colonization
| to still occur.
|
| So, yeah? It all strikes me as a pretty normal conservative
| estimate intended to let them figure out some kind of
| reasonable lower bound here. All pretty normal stuff.
| user-the-name wrote:
| What is "conservative" about a civilisation lasting 100
| million years? That is literally astronomical. That about
| twice as long as grass has existed.
| Aeolun wrote:
| > Remember we're talking about a civilization that can
| cross the galaxy here.
|
| That would be earth at the current point in time. Given
| 100k years I'm sure we could fabricate a huge colony
| ship, and accelerate it to 10km/s. What we won't be able
| to do is throw up habitats all over the solar system.
|
| By that point all your tech is thousands of years old. It
| seems unlikely it'd be capable of doing more than drop
| you off on whatever planet you were aiming for (or keep
| floating around, if it's a lifeless husk).
| bamurphymac1 wrote:
| Early bird gets the worm.
| biggestlou wrote:
| I'm still looking for intelligent life on _this_ planet!
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